One Minute Out
Verdoorn had a staff of dozens, all hard men well aware of the organization they serviced and the industry in which it did business, but tonight he flew south towards Croatia with only his nine best assets. These were all former South African military officers, all highly trained with weapons and tactics, but beyond this, each and every one of them had learned the art of invisibility.
It was Verdoorn’s own fascination with and study of the Gray Man, years ago when he was put on the hunt, that made him mandate to his assets that they dress, behave, and operate in the field not as members of an intelligence service or a military unit but as regular members of the public. To this end they made dozens of adjustments to normal operating procedure regarding dress, communications, equipment, tactics, and the like.
They didn’t work in teams of two or three, an instantaneous tip-off to some watchers. No, Verdoorn’s assets each operated alone when on surveillance missions, while remaining in covert communications with one another.
These nine men, plus Verdoorn, were elite specialists in the tradecraft of remaining clandestine, and Jaco Verdoorn had employed this team on dozens of operations for the Consortium around the world.
The Gulfstream hit some turbulence, and this woke Verdoorn up. He looked out the portal at the night sky—he imagined they were somewhere over Austria about now—and he thought about going to the galley for a bottle of water.
Just as he was about to release his seat belt, the phone next to Jaco Verdoorn flashed. He scooped it up. “Yeah?”
It was the cockpit. The first officer was a White Lion pilot who, previous to joining the security firm, flew Saab Gripen fighters for the South African air force. “Call for you, sir.”
“Send it through, Jimmy.”
And for the next ten minutes, the president of White Lion corporate security and the director of operations of the Consortium spoke with Kostas Kostopoulos, the regional director of the Consortium in the Balkan states.
* * *
• • •
The Gulfstream only had seating for nine in the cabin, but there was a belted seat in the aft lavatory, and here Rodger Loots slept, only somewhat annoyed to be assigned to the lav seat because he’d worked in conditions a hell of a lot more austere than a sleek corporate jet, even considering the fact he was sitting in the shitter.
Loots stirred with the buffeting turbulence, then looked at his watch. It was twenty-two fifteen, and he figured they must be somewhere over Austria by now.
Just then the PA in the lav chirped, and he heard his boss’s commanding voice. “Rodge . . . front and center, yeah?”
Seconds later Loots squatted down next to Verdoorn in the center of the cabin. “What’s up, boss?”
“We have a new target.”
“Damn. Was hoping we’d get a shot at the Gray Man.”
“We still might, actually. A woman who works for Europol is down in Dubrovnik asking questions about the Consortium.”
“By name?”
“By name.”
“Shit.”
“She went straight to the local cops, who we have in our pocket, and said she was part of an investigation into trafficking involving the pipeline and the Consortium.”
“Shit,” Loots repeated.
“Shit is right, but the police chief, who is with us, checked her story out with The Hague.” Verdoorn looked down at his notepad, now sitting on top of the Gentry dossier. Reading the notes he’d jotted down while talking to Kostas, he said, “Talyssa Corbu is an economic crimes analyst from Romania, she’s got nothing to do with trafficking, and, according to her employers, she is currently on a personal hiatus at work due to some sort of a family emergency back home in Bucharest.”
“What the hell is she doing in Dubrovnik, then?”
“The Hague thinks she’s trying to crack some case open to get advancement. Something about money laundering. Sounds like she’s bloody bonkers.”
“So . . . she’s workin’ off book?”
“Totally. Swingin’ in the bloody wind. I looked at the names of the merchandise in the pipeline now and don’t see any relation to her. This seems like it is, in fact, her bid for a pat on the back and a shot at advancement.”
“So since she’s on her own, we need to remove her.”
“Bladdy right. The fact that she knows about the Consortium means she’s a dead woman. She’s staying in Dubrovnik. The cops have followed her and confirmed she’s alone, but the timing with the Gray Man activity over the border in Bosnia is too convenient for my taste. She’s workin’ with ole Gentry, I’m sure of it. She’s the face and he’s the brawn in whatever little scheme the two have cooked up.”
“What’s our role, boss?”
“The police chief in Dubrovnik wants this woman picked up tonight and disposed of. The Greek is sending a team of Albanians to take her from her pension and put a knife in her, then splash her in the Adriatic. But Kostopoulos has agreed to order them to hold her at a safe house till I get there. I want to question her before they put her on ice.”
“We should grab her off the street ourselves. You know how it is with the Albanians. They’ve got the will . . . good hard heads for this sort of thing, decent shooters. But they’re not the sharpest tacks, are they?”
Verdoorn shrugged. “No, they’re not. But taking the woman off the playing field at the first opportunity is the right call. Whatever intel she has, it’s a danger having it out there in public. I’ll go to the safe house and interrogate her myself, see what she knows about Gentry and who else she’s talked to. I’ll squeeze her hard, pass her back to the Albanians for disposal, and then we’ll go after our man.”
“Sounds good.”
“Only problem is this. There is a shipment in Dubrovnik right now, sped up due to the Gray Man hit in Mostar. They’re waiting on transport, which isn’t coming till early tomorrow morning.” He added, “It’s a VIP shipment, and one of the items is tagged for special handling.”
“Unlucky,” Loots said. He knew a VIP shipment meant the women being shipped had been picked out at other way stations and evaluated as being of especially high quality. This stock was sold in a special quarterly market, where criminal organizations around Europe and the Middle East could bid on merchandise that had the potential to earn them millions of euros throughout their admittedly short life cycle. These items could generate a dozen times what the average woman being sold into sexual slavery by the Consortium could produce.
The special-handling item Verdoorn referred to meant a woman who was to be protected at all costs because of the destination she was heading to and the men who had ordered her taken. One of these special-handling captives was worth a dozen or more of the other VIP whores, and after a brutal indoctrination period of travel through the pipeline, these women were then treated with kid gloves. Their mental and physical health was improved through a time-honed process to make them ready for their duties ahead.